Democracy is...

A youtube person/Blogger called Lyla put up a video as part of the Democracy Challenge, a competition put forward by the American Government. In it she puts down how she sees democracy.

Democracy is understanding
Democracy is loving others as you love yourself
Democracy is patience
Democracy is choice
Democracy is faith
Democracy is perspective
Democracy can be evil
Democracy can be good
Democracy is seeing the world for the way it is

I would like to answer some of these and maybe put forward some of my own.

Firstly, in and of itself, Democracy simply a choice. In our day and age is a choice over who becomes revered. It is usually considered as this in government, but has spread to things like awards (The Logies, Australian Idol). In Western Society, we have decided that we need almost absolute autonomy. We need the choice over things that don't affect us in the slightest as well as over the things that will affect us in the highest. However in this case we will be discussing democracy as the political system.
The rest of Lyla's list therefore is what she sees the outworking of democracy to be and therefore to discuss these they will be as opinion and will be compared with opinion.

Democracy is patience (with people rather than a situation is implied). I personally agree. The problem with this is that through democracy we demand to be able to do something now. We can see this with the campaign led by Sydney Morning Herald to 'Reclaim Your Vote'. Basically it is trying to enable people to not have to wait in a bad enough situation. Then we get a situation like in the US at the moment. Obama's call was for change. So people in their infinite wisdom decided that they wanted change now even when he said that it would take time and not be all done in one term let alone one year.
Democracy requires patience, but it invites impatience.

Democracy is faith (that things can get better). Yes it is. But it is also faith that things can get worse. In the book Looking for Alibrandi, one of the main characters gets up and says that the only reason that he will vote is to keep the worse guys out. Democracy has the faith that no matter what, things can and will change. Our part in democracy is deciding which parts will change.

Time for me to add one more.
Democracy is not an excuse. You can't claim that because you were voted for, you can do whatever you want. You can't get yourself voted in through democracy and then allow yourself to become a dictator.

Post Australia Day

Today is the 27th of January. Yesterday was Australia Day. In the past Australia has managed to get itself a bad reputation as the day that bogans come out to play, either getting completely drunk by 10 in the morning and then working up to pickled from there, gang bashing other Australians that happened to be of a different cultural or racial background as your group, or both. This year by all accounts, it seemed to be that people went out, had a few drinks with mates, had some fun down at the beach, but didn't cause trouble, and so it was a lot nicer than it has been in the past (think last year in Manly). The question that has to be asked in light of these sorts of things happening is, what is the national identity that Australia actually has? There is a stereotype of being either Crocodile Dundee, or Farmers, or Surfers and Beach bums that we have overseas. While this might not be completely accurate, we tend to play to these stereotypes. But is this our national identity. It used to be an identity as a convict nation but we've grown past that and while we might, albeit counter-intuitively, be proud of that, it isn't what we are anymore and thus can't be what we base our national identity on. So what is it that we can identify ourselves as?

I would argue nothing. We can't identify our nation as anything besides a group of Australians. Our country has moved beyond anything that would hold us together in any capacity except for the fact that we are currently from Australia where ever we may have been from in the past. It used to be that we were a country based on our 'belonging to' and then later, our loyalty to England. If you say that you are loyal to England these days you are dismissed as an idiot or put in the same group as the whinging poms. Looking historically at England, it is an amalgam of virtually every east European nation. Even the language is an amalgam of Greek and Roman with a few others added in for good measure and Australia now is like that, a 'bitsa' of a country, with no more loyalty to 'the Motherland' than a dog has to the petshop.

The only thing that we can Identify ourselves as, our national identity, is Australia. We need to embrace this instead of being afraid of being ourselves or trying to keep the status quo that ran away for the last time fifty years ago.

Why music is important

This comes from a poster I have seen around in a few places, mostly places that teach music. Thus, it is more appropriate for teaching music, but the conclusions that it makes are still good for everyone.

Why Do We Teach Music?

Music is a science
• It is exact, specific; and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor's full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.

Music is mathematical
• It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

Music is a foreign language
• Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English--but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.

Music is history
• Music usually reflects the environments and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.

Music is a physical education
• It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, cheek, and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

Music is all these things, but most of all music is art
• It allows a human being to take all these dry technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.

That is Why We Teach Music!
• Not because we expect you to major in music
• Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life
• Not so you can relax
• Not so you can have fun
• Not Because we expect you to major in music
• BUT--so you will be human
• So you will recognize beauty
• So you will be sensitive
• So you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
• So you will have something to cling to
• So you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good--in short, more life.

Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless we know how to live?
That is Why We Teach Music!

Armageddon

The doomsday clock is a clock intended to show how close the human race is to annihilation by nuclear weapons. The way it works is that the closer it is to midnight, the closer we are to mutually assured destruction. It is affected by the worldwide political climate and so the closest it has been to midnight was in 1953, ten years into the cold war. At that stage it was set at 11:58, meaning that nuclear annihilation was probably just around the corner and it stayed at this level for roughly 7 years. The lowest it has been set was at 11:43 in 1991, the end of the cold war. It has now been set at 11:54 following an agreement to try and reduce numbers of nuclear weapons world wide.
I wonder if you can you figure out my problem with the doomsday clock. I have two.

The first is that it is a self fulfilling prophesy. The first thing that people do when they find out that they might be under threat is they try and find ways of reducing that threat. And what is the best defence? a good offence. Meaning that if a country thinks that another country means to attack them with nuclear weapons they will try and acquire more for themselves. If you set-up a worldwide threat meter like the doomsday clock, everyone looks at it and says, "wow, it's getting bad, time to get some/more of them ourselves and make sure we can all strike back." We saw this effect during the Cold War. Russia and the USA were at a standoff . This in turn would push the time up closer to midnight. This is just me saying it, but it's coming from my experience of human nature, take it or leave it as you will.

The second is a bit more complicated because it involves psychology and that always messes things up. To start with, yes, if nuclear war does eventuate, then it will be effectively mean the end of things on earth. And yes, if someone does start wholesale nuking other countries then everyone else will start nuking back. The rules of engagement for any type of weaponry or warfare are as follows: if you hit me, I'm allowed to hit you back and with nukes, I can start to hit you before you finish hitting me. Then all of my friends will get in on the act and start hitting you and all of your friends will help you out also and starting my friends; nuclear war. This will never happen. Call me an optimist, but I can't see this ever happening.
In the Art of War by SunTzu, the seminal work on anything military, we read "IV:I, The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy." You only fight unless you are assured of winning and in a situation like nuclear warfare, you can't assure your victory will be greater than the enemy's victory. This is the first reason that no leader of a country or military wants nuclear warfare.
Leaders of countries have another reason as well. Say you win, what do you get? a blasted wasteland who's surviving population will hate you until they die and global condemnation for the result. This is not a victory. Militarily you may have won, but in all other facets, you have lost.
The final, and perhaps most convincing reason that I have, is an effect that can be best described in terms of torture. Torture is always the last resort of interrogation because up until then your motivator is fear. During torture, the motivator is pain and the alleviation of it. People can survive pain, they can not survive fear. As soon as the pain starts, people can think, this will be over, and I can deal with it; fear means that they 'know' that they can't. How is this related? People won't start nuclear warfare for fear that it will start. Once it has started, people think, I have to see this to the end.Until then, people won't want to start anything because the certainty of them dying is playing on their minds. This is called a survival instinct and it is hard wired into our brains. People fear death, and will in most cases do anything to avoid it. This means that only someone who either doesn't care if they die (suicidal) or is convinced that they won't die (delusional and idiotic) or doesn't care about the lives of anyone else (psychotic and sociopathic) will be willing to start nuclear warfare.

So you see, I feel optimistic about nuclear warfare, not something that most people will actually do, but something that I think is fair. The doomsday clock is nothing more than a gimmick left over from a time when this was a new technology and people had itchy trigger fingers.

Conclusions: a fun place to stay

In the newspaper the other day, there was an article about the use of cosmetics in ancient times, and by ancient times, I don't mean ancient Greece of Egypt sort of ancient times, I mean prehistoric times. Now, it may be surprising, but I don't actually want to talk about the article at all. "Why did I bring it up then?" I hear you ask. The answer is what happened in the pull out quote. They quoted an archaeologist as saying essentially that the conclusion that they had drawn was the only feasible one that could be had. Do you see what he did there? He made a conclusion based on minimal information, some evidence, and his interpretation of these two. This is what I want to talk about.

In the book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the three main characters all come to conclusions quite independently. This results in them literally jumping to a place called Conclusions (due to the nature of the book, this makes sense). Nothing can possibly go wrong now, We have plenty of time, and It certainly couldn't be a nicer day are the three conclusions in question. These seem to be fairly minor, but it's worth noting that even these are unprovable claims; conclusions that have been 'jumped to'. Things like a man sits down at a piano, you make the conclusion that he can play it or a woman holds a baby on her own you assume that it is hers.

This is a danger that we all succumb to. We twist facts to fit theories instead of twisting theories to fit facts. This means that we give ourselves blind spots in regards to facts that have been proven wrong (because they once 'proved' the theory) and won't allow ourselves to accept facts that don't fit our theories. In this case, mineral pigment was found in 2 half oyster shells therefore, they must have been used for cosmetics. Now aside from the fact that they have only found two or they might have been used as paint palates for the much touted cave paintings, there is still the fact that we don't actually know and yet, it obviously means this. Like I said earlier, minimal information, even less evidence and an interpretation.

This often happens with history. In the future, archaeologists will jump to the conclusion that all anyone ever did now was to sit on the internet watching cats and talking about not sitting on the internet (even though this is fairly true). This is because they weren't here, they don't know but they have some evidence that points to these facts.

The saying goes that "when you assume you make as ass out of u and me" and this holds in most cases like this one. The problem with assumptions is that most times once it is made, it is much harder to change your mind about it later.

Now there is a danger that is less prevalent and in most cases not as bad, but can still often have negative results. This is the danger of NOT drawing a conclusion despite the fact that there is only one possible conclusion to make. The theory behind this is that there could be more information that will have to change the theory. While I can understand this, it also is a problem. The issue between the two is finding a balance, not jumping to conclusions too soon, and not getting left behind the three corollaries of the aforementioned (correct) conclusion.

What is evil

One of the Forums that I occasionally haunt, often has very interesting discussion topics. One of the most interesting of these recently was the question "What is Evil?" Being curious as to what other people thought about the nature of evil I had a look and was genuinely surprised at the sophistication of some of the responses. You had the usual troll answers such anything christian, athiest, muslim etc, and then you had some well thought out definitions. Some of them were amusing, some of them were quite intelligent and fairly easily defendable.
I think the biggest divider between "everyday evil" and "truly evil" is motive. Everyday evil has some justification, some rationalization to explain their actions. True evil is evil for the sake of evil.

To be Truely Evil... One must have style. Do you want to destroy the city with an easily accessible nuke? NO!! You want to destroy it with a large (cumbersome) robot. That is what seperates regular crime from someone that is Truely Evil.

First, everything true evil must understand the conceptions of "good" and "evil". Second, everything true evil must willingly walk down the path of "evil". Third, everything true evil must act in a manner of "evil" in a conscious condition, regardless what´s the outcome. No takebacks, no regrets, no exceptions, no excuses.

To corrupt a thing. To ravage and defile, to twist it into a mockery of what it once was. It seems to have the highest potential for inflicting suffering on an individual who valued the original.

It shouldn't be so stupid or short-sighted that it will self-destruct, so Evil should be ruthlessly selfish, except that it won't kill what it uses/needs to survive.

Evil does not want to self destruct, however by its very nature it cannot create, evil can only destroy. This is not to say all destruction is evil, but it is to say that evil cannot create it can only make a mockery of creation. Evil propagates more evil, that's always important.

But isn't "true evil" basically just being unethical to the n^th degree? Where do we draw the line then?

I would argue that a misunderstanding of good and evil is almost required for something to be evil, few villains consider themselves evil, rather they will view their actions as positive. Sure, Darth Vader caused millions (likely trillions, actually) of deaths, but he did so to advance uniformity and justice throughout almost the entire galaxy, whether the galaxy wanted it his way or not, so he was clearly not evil. [at least in his head]

or as one person put it
The most pure representation of evil I have come across is Iago from Othello. He is astoundingly manipulative, utilizes Machiavellian concepts constantly (and not in a good way), is amazingly deceptive, and does it all in iambic pentameter.

The end result of all the to-ing and fro-ing was this list.
1. It must know good and evil and choose to be evil, consciously committing evil acts.
2. Intelligent enough not to engage in self destructive behaviour or exhaust it's food and/or power.
3. Selfish
4. Malicious-Sadistic.
5. Deceiving/providing false hope.
6. Viral
7. Forcing/deceiving others to do it's will.

However, possibly the most interesting response was
Describing evil, to me, is a little like describing God or unicorns. I don't really believe it exists. I mean, sure, there are people and organizations that have caused untold suffering and death for millions of people, but that does not mean that said entities were/are invested with some sort of metaphysical quality of Evil.

Probably the most well known definition comes from the DnD universe. Here they give 3 variants of evil; Chaotic, Neutral, and interestingly, Lawful Evil. These 3 give you a fairly broad spectrum under the banner of evil based on their work in society. A Lawful Evil person will follow a set in order to get what ever they can get for themselves, probably best defined as Machiavellian. They will be methodical and intentional in their evil. The Neutral Evil person will do evil purely for the sake of it. They will have no honour in their evil as the Lawful person will but also won't vary in their evil. Finally the Chaotic Evil person. These people will do what ever their destructive nature leads them to do.

Any hoo, that was just something to think about during your new year holiday thingos.

A new year. A new leaf?

Traditional at this time of year is the laughable activity of making resolutions, things that you will or won't do in order to make yourself a better person. Traditional activities for a weeks time therefore include things like forgetting to go the the gym, smoking, eating out, what ever it happens to be.
The theory behind this is that with a new year comes a new chance to make things anew - to stop doings that you don't think you should be doing or to start doing things that you should be doing. This is ridiculous. The only thing that a new year really brings is a new number and a new excuse for the retail industry to 'lower' prices again (excuse my cynicism). It must be noted here that I have nothing against the resolution itself, the thing that I object to is the idea that these things must be undertaken at the new year.

In the movie Fight Club, a main character says that self improvement is worthless, and that self destruction is a better path to yourself. The theory behind this is the engineering theory that when you take anything that is unessential, you are left with something that is essentially perfect. This is in one sense true. However, what it fails to take into account is that humanity and human life is not some engineering project, it isn't a great finished work. Every human is a work in progress, but every human is a work in progress that hasn't found its exhaustive list of purposes yet. What I mean is that every person living will almost definately have to change what they are doing at some future stage in their lives, and that will probably require adding something, not taking something away.
But that's not what I wanted to discuss. Stop making me digress people or I'll never get to the point.

In every endeavour, if you do not progress or advance, you recede. This is what a resolution is. It is an attempted advancement or progression to what you deem as a better you. The problem is that in general we either pick something that is only a minor change, I will wear my underwear for less than two weeks at a time before washing them, or we pick something that is so hard we will never be able to do it, I will finish the last three years of my medicine degree while picking up a degree in law for thursday afternoons by the end of January. This way we can either feel good about doing something, or we can placate ourselves by saying "well, you never really had a chance did you".

My call is for you to decide to make a change, and then another one, and then another one, and then another one until such time as you don't think about them anymore, but don't make this the resolution. If needed, make small changes, I will have only 17 servings instead of 18 at desert time, but keep making changes, otherwise you go backwards.

I'll leave you with a list of resolutions over time. See what you think.

• 2009: I will pay off my bank loan promptly.
• 2010: I will pay off my bank loans promptly.
• 2011: I will be totally out of debt by next year.
• 2012: I will try to pay off the debt interest by next year.
• 2013: I will try to be out of the country by next year.